Emma K. Thomas

“In East Anglia they call unkempt and unresolved corners of the land ‘muddles’; and it was the post-war un-muddling of the landscape, the concerted drive towards tidiness and efficiency, that marked the turning-point for the barn owl. Almost everywhere the green lanes and road verges were overmown and drenched with chemicals. The pastures were converted to arable and the stackyards to silos. The barns themselves were flattened, or made into smart houses. Many of the owls were flattened, too, hunting along old routeways that had suddenly become major roads.

What is one to make of the decline of the screech owl – Norfolk’s Billy Wise, Yorkshire’s Jenny Howler, Sussex’s Moggy – a passing perhaps unmourned by the increasing numbers of people who have never seen one in the wild? Few birds are so dramatically beautiful, or can bring the exquisite delicacy of flight so close to us, or can look at us so penetratingly, eye to eye. But they mean more than that. Ecologists look to the condition of ‘top predators’ as a measure of how well the ecosystem on which they depend is working. The barn owl is a cultural indicator, too. We recognise, at a deep level, the meaning of that ritual crossing of the fields. It is a sacrament, a consecration of ‘good ground’ and the boundaries between light and dark, of the proper order of things. Just as the summer migrants stand for renewal, so the barn owl stands for continuity, and its passing leaves us that bit less grounded.”

From Nature Cure by Richard Mabey.

Published by Vintage.